Shakespeare and Upward Metaphor
Perhaps no-one has metaphorized the higher-order with greater strength and facility than Shakespeare. (The higher-order, the transcendent: what isn't directly available to the senses but takes place, as it were, in an abstracted realm above them.)
The gaudy, blabbing, and remorseful day
Is crept into the bosom of the sea
... If I must die,
I will encounter darkness as a bride,
And hug it in mine arms.
... Trust none;
For oaths are straws, men's faiths are wafer-cakes,
And holdfast is the only dog, my duck.
Why, then the world's mine oyster,
Which I with sword will open.
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.[1]
The samples are in rough order of degree of tenor abstraction, 'upwardness'. The (summarized) vehicles are on the left:
retreating extravert => close of day
sexual encounter => death
straws / cakes => promises, commitments
closed oyster => a particular opportunity[2]
state of tide => existential opportunity in general .
The mapping of ‘tide and voyage’ to ‘existential opportunity’ in the last passage is worked at length without loss of strength; and the lines that follow hold the mapping while dropping some height to focus on a current instance of the wider theme:
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves
Or lose our ventures.
But take the first four lines again:
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
There is more here than the tide itself. Subsidiary factors enrich the metaphor. (It seems a presumption to poke about with Shakespeare but this is a viewpoint on language’s central terrain, and we won’t find a better one. Nowhere does the life of our here-and-now engagements, in tune with yet more basal embodied flow and rhythm, metaphorize upward with greater strength.)
The metaphoric vehicle, enhanced by its subsidiaries, shapes and illuminates the higher-order: not factitiously, but in a way that finds a pre-existing or proto-existing truth. It meets with and is confirmed within our network of worldly engagements. It rings true. A select instance of a defining human achievement – to live in two worlds at once by means of the transcendent projection of upward metaphor, where no other organism has ever lived in more than one.
So what of the subsidiary factors? Flow: the great gift of English iambics, and iambic pentameter in particular, to make space for a saying and to stud it with emphasis-points – in my reading of the first line tide, affairs and men are fully stressed, is lightly, the not at all. This interplay of word and rhythmic emphasis pushes forward the key words, making vivid the nature of the metaphoric vehicle (tide/voyage) and its tenor (opportunity). The poetic structure, the pentameter, with the in-breath/out-breath tempo of its couplets, mirrors the subject/predicate alternation of the line pairs (a tide/which taken at the flood; the voyage .../is bound in shallows). Such flow factors have been called ‘vitality-affect contours[3] – proto-meaningful dynamics, across or beneath all sensory modality, which play an essential part in the embodied underpinning of meaning.
The flow of meaning pivots on the half-way semi-colon, after fortune. A slight pause in the reading (or else the tongue trips) stops short the consonantal flow of the second line (flood / leads / fortune), and emphasizes the ‘if this ... if that ...’ quandary (fortune / miseries). The contrasting whispery consonance and half-consonance of the fourth line (shallows ... miseries) underpins the existential contrast.
All these, I should stress, are not just bits and pieces of ‘skill’. Their work is to allow the metaphor its strength. Not to sell it, talk it up – but to make present and alive the mapping of tenor to vehicle. That connection is in some sense already there, is in and of the world; strong metaphor is a discovery rather than a construct.
[1] Henry VI (2) 4:1; Measure for Measure 3:1; Henry V 2:3; The Merry Wives of Windsor 2:2; Julius Caesar 4:3
[2] The character Pistol needs money and plans to sell his sword. A double metaphor perhaps: sword-as-blade the vehicle for sword-as-merchandise; closed but openable oyster as vehicle for opportunity. But the ramifications blur into a single compressed figure.
[3] 'Vitality-affect contours' was used by Daniel Stern's (1985) The Interpersonal World of the Infant in connection with mother-child interaction, and subsequently picked up by Mark Johnson from Stern and from the earlier work of Susanne Langer (Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling I, 1967) and others and claimed as a basal element in all meaningful human functioning: see Johnson's (2007) The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding 43-5 and passim. Johnson’s book is the best and most erudite account of embodied meaning I know of; though (to spoil the compliment) it remains within the horizons of American pragmatism, and needs Heidegger for a necessarily broader view.